There is a fountain pen on my desk that I have owned for thirty-two years. It is, by any reasonable measure, an inefficient instrument. And yet I find I cannot do without it.

I came to writing late, by the standards of the age. My first novel was published when I was forty-one, my second at forty-seven, and the third — the one that finally found readers — when I was nearly fifty-three. I do not say this to flatter the slow; I say it because I am no longer certain there is any other way to write a sentence that will outlast its weather.

The Weather of a Sentence

A sentence has weather. It arrives, it lingers, it passes. The trouble with our present moment — and I include myself in it, despite my pen — is that we have begun to mistake the climate for the work. We confuse the storm of attention with the slow soil of meaning.

“Patience is not the absence of action. It is the form action takes when it has nothing left to prove.”

A Small Rebellion

I write four hundred words a day. Sometimes fewer. On a triumphant morning, perhaps six hundred. This is not modesty; it is arithmetic. A novel of eighty thousand words, written at this pace, takes me roughly two hundred working days. It is the slowest I know how to be, and it is, I have come to think, the most honest.

I offer no instruction. Only the small observation that the world will not, in fact, end if you write one true sentence today and nothing more.